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Saturday, September 16, 2017

Feelings Trump Reality

I have not posted anything lately, because Hurricane Irma was imminent
and on my mind, and then I was without power and the Internet for days. Yes, I
live somewhere in Florida, in a region ofthe state that was relentlessly baptized by an outer band of the storm,
rich in rain and howling winds.

The Hurricane of the Thought Police

advances without opposition

Now that I’m back in business, and able to catch up on the news, I see
that a new hurricane is imminent, that is, the storm of censorship and the
enforcement of politically correct thought, speech, and writing. It promises to
wreck destruction not just on Florida, but on the whole of Western
civilization. The storm has been collecting strength for decades as it
approaches the mainland of Freedom of Speech.

When to date the origins of the storm? Let’s say in 1995, with the
publication of a fussy, snarky book, addressed mostly to academics. I quote
from the article I wrote about it, “The
Ghouls of Grammatical Egalitarianism.”

A small, innocuous-looking book
appeared in bookstores recently, published under the auspices of the
Association of American University Presses (AAUP), an organization which claims
to be devoted to the dissemination of knowledge and scholarly research. Its
title is Guidelines
for Bias-Free Writing, by Marilyn Schwartz and the Task Force on
Bias-Free Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). It is little
more than 100 pages long, weighs less than a pound, yet its contents are more
potent than the Oklahoma City bomb. Its ingredients are politically correct
jargon, multiculturalism, and the phenomenon of what may be called “grammatical
egalitarianism.”

It is important to
note at the start that the Association boasts a membership of 114 institutions,
mostly university presses, but includes such diverse organizations as the
National Academy Press, the National Gallery of Art, the Modern Language
Association, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the J. Paul Getty Trust. Its
membership includes all major American and Canadian universities, plus Oxford
University Press and presses in Tokyo, South America, and Scandinavia. This is
an organization with significant cultural clout.

Guidelines promotes and
encourages “grammatical egalitarianism,” which in practice serves to stifle the
dissemination of knowledge and scholarly research.

Presciently, Guidelines, in
1995, covered virtually every issue now
at large in 2017, including feminism, “social justice,” and race. Feelings have
replaced language as a mode of expression.

Guidelines
includes the disclaimer, “there is no such thing as a truly bias-free language”
and stresses that the advice it offers is only “that of white, North American (specifically U.S.), feminist publishing
professionals.” The Task Force, which is composed of 21 university press
editors (two of them men), recommends euphemistic proxies for all of the terms
on its “hit list.” [Brackets mine]

This is true. There is no such thing as a truly bias-free language,
but Marilyn Schwartz and her team resisted that truism anyway. A truly bias-free language would be no language
at all, except for grunts, gesticulations, and facial expressions. But even
those would not be free of bias.
Looking through an atomic microscope, without a bias-loaded language, how would
a scientist otherwise say that an atom’s valence of electrons is abnormal? How
would one say that “this is a very good (or bad) painting”? How would one say,
“I love you.”? I leave it to your biased
imagination. Because language is governed by values – that is, by “bias” – such as objective truth, it enables
precise communication. Without bias,
language, communication, and the formation of concepts would be impossible to
men.

Concepts represent a
system of mental filing and cross-filing, so complex that the largest
electronic computer is a child’s toy by comparison. This system serves as the
context, the frame-of-reference, by means of which man grasps and classifies
(and studies further) every existent he encounters and every aspect of reality.
Language is the physical (visual-audible) implementation of this system.

Concepts and,
therefore, language are primarily a tool of cognition—not of
communication, as is usually assumed. Communication is merely the consequence,
not the cause nor the primary purpose of concept-formation—a crucial
consequence, of invaluable importance to men, but still only a consequence. Cognition
precedes communication; the necessary pre-condition of communication is
that one have something to communicate. (This is true even of communication
among animals, or of communication by grunts and growls among inarticulate men,
let alone of communication by means of so complex and exacting a tool as
language.) The primary purpose of concepts and of language is to provide man
with a system of cognitive classification and organization, which enables him
to acquire knowledge on an unlimited scale; this means: to keep order in man’s
mind and enable him to think.

Language is a
conceptual tool—a code of visual-auditory symbols that denote concepts. To a
person who understands the function of language, it makes no difference what
sounds are chosen to name things, provided these sounds refer to clearly
defined aspects of reality. But to a tribalist, language is a mystic heritage,
a string of sounds handed down from his ancestors and memorized, not
understood. To him, the importance lies in the perceptual concrete, the sound
of a word, not its meaning. . . .

Moves to penalize “hate speech” are moves to prevent the
identification of things and to punish thought. A law student at Edinburgh
University is being “investigated” for using very biased language against Islam
and supporting President Trump’s MOAB destruction of an ISIS mountain center in
Afghanistan. Fox
News reported:

A British University
student who supports President Donald Trump has been subjected to an
investigation for putting “minority students at risk and in a state of panic
and fear” after he mocked the Islamic State group on social media.

Edinburgh University
officials have launched an inquiry into comments made by Robbie Travers, 21,
who allegedly committed a “hate crime” when he mocked jihadists in Iraq and
Syria, the Times of London reported.

In April, Travers
celebrated the U.S. military bombing of an ISIS center in Afghanistan using the
so-called “mother of all bombs” – a strike that killed at least 36 ISIS
militants, Fox
News reported.

Of course, neither “Islamophobia” nor “biased” words have the physical
property to hurt anyone, yet the mere utterance of words is believed by those
whose minds are self-inoculated against reality to have the power to put some
people “at risk” and to instill in them fear and panic. To them, words are
bricks that can inflict mental anguish. The speech censors and regulators as
well as the “minority students” do not subscribe to the 19th century children’s
rhyme, “Sticks and stonesmay
break my bones, but words will never break
me.” The adage is an anathema to those who feel a need for coddling and insulation
from words.

The censors and regulators aim to treat adults as children who
feelings may be impaired or damaged by the “sticks and stones” of mere words. The
infantile adults must therefore be “protected” from “hate speech,” which could include
anything from a scholarly work on Islam to a passing dirty look on the street.

Britain is not alone in unrolling the legal duct tape to stifle
criticism of especially Islam. Among the European countries cracking down on
alleged “hate speech,” Germany is the most zealous. The Washington
Post reported in January 2016:

As Western Europe’s
most populous nation grapples with a historic wave of mostly-Muslim migrants,
politicians and activists are decrying a rash of incendiary speech bubbling to
the surface of German society. In a country whose Nazi past led to some of the
strictest laws in the West protecting minorities from people inciting hatred,
prosecutors are launching investigations into inflammatory comments as judges
dole out fines, even probation time, to the worst offenders.

German authorities, meanwhile,
have reached a deal with Facebook, Google and Twitter to get tougher on
offensive content, with the outlets agreeing to apply domestic laws, rather
than their own corporate policies, to reviews of posts.

Critics call it the
enforcement of political correctness, raising the question of what constitutes
hate speech and sparking a national debate over free expression. Germans have
been outraged, for instance, by reports of more than 100 sexual assaults and
robberies in the city of Cologne
allegedly committed by gangs of young Arab and North African men on New Year’s
Eve.

Fortune
Magazine in June ran a lengthy article on the scope of Germany’s censorship
by proxy with the help of tech companies. The government establishes the
censorial policies, leaving the tech companies
to do the dirty work of enforcement.

German lawmakers
formally approved a new law that will expose social media companies such as Facebook to heavy fines if
they fail to take down hate speech and other criminal content.

Under the law, which
will come into effect in October, Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, and other
social media platforms will have to take down posts containing “obviously
illegal” material within 24 hours of being notified of it. For less “obviously”
criminal content, the compliance timeframe is seven days. If they repeatedly
fail to meet those deadlines, they will be liable for fines of up to 50 million
Euros ($56 million).

The law is a
landmark in holding social media companies accountable for the material posted
on their sites. It sets a precedent, in the West at least, that contradicts
U.S. legislation passed at the dawn of the Internet age that broadly shields
tech companies from such liabilities.

Neither has “hate speech” the intrinsic, magical power to physically
harm anyone. An utterance of hate cannot smack one in the jaw, but it isn’t the
words that assault one physically. It is the action accompanying it. Islamic
“hate speech” by itself cannot harm anyone; it is but the emotionalist ranting
of lunatics who refuse to think. It is only when they murder. However, to
attempt to police “hate speech” of any species, is to punish, penalize, and
arrest concept formation, and is futile, because it asks men to cease thinking.
If you want a demonstration of the futility of searching for a lost meatball in
a mound of spaghetti, see Tucker
Carlson arguing with a college professor who is also an Antifa activist, about
the alleged “right” of masked thugs to throttle freedom of speech.

A line from an extremely tedious, yawn-inducing film, “Salt and Fire,” about an
allegedly man-caused catastrophic disaster, a spreading salt flat in South
America, reveals the operative epistemology and metaphysics of political
correctness and European leaders:

“There is no
reality, only perceptions, anger, and views. All collective anxieties condense
into conspiracies.”

“Wolves” from The Walking Dead

Europe is mired in this subjectivist, Kantian-Hegelian, suicidal
mare’s nest, and doesn’t seem to be able to extract itself from it, or has shown
any inclination to want to. Europe is in a philosophical, almost masochistic self-induced
coma. It fears the reality of an Islamic takeover, and knows it will be
painful, but is willing to undergo the transformation. Its political leaders
are quite willing to subject their populations to the pain, but are reluctant
to experience it themselves. They have mentally inoculated themselves from the
brutal reality of their kneejerk, embedded evasion – taking refuge in the gated
communities of political power and privilege and their armies of security – and
the devil, the rest of us, must take the hindmost.

6 comments:

Excellent piece, Ed. I've long thought that the expressed desire to avoid hurt feelings is just a fig leaf to justify cultural re-engineering and censorship in the service of cultural Marxism, otherwise known as political correctness, though the idea that "Your rights end where my feelings begin" is a seductive anti-concept that has proved devastatingly effective at not just making censorship appear necessary and proper, but also at making the so-called standards of what constitutes proper or improper speech entirely subjective.

Thanks, Tom. I listened to the Tucker Carlson interview of the college teacher/Antifa activist twice. Carlson kept being amazed at the hubris of the long-haired creep. He couldn't quite grasp that the guy meant it, when he said that words hurt feelings, that they were forms of actual "violence" that should be met with physical violence.

Was not the Society of Pippins, condemned because words were considered bricks against the King? And again the same with Hyperborea? It is an amusing, if not concerning, similiarity we find ourselves in today, which you wrote in fiction years ago!

Edward Cline, American Novelist

Edward Cline was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1946. After graduating from high school (in which he learned nothing of value) and a stint in the Air Force, he pursued his ambition to become a novelist. His first detective novel, First Prize, was published in 1988 by Mysterious Press/Warner Books, and his first suspense novel, Whisper the Guns, was published in 1992 by The Atlantean Press. First Prize was republished in 2009 by Perfect Crime. The Sparrowhawk series of novels set in England and Virginia in the pre-Revolutionary period has garnered critical acclaim (but not yet from the literary establishment) and universal appreciation from the reading public, including parents, teachers, students, scholars, and adult readers who believe that American history has been abandoned or is misrepresented by a government-dominated educational establishment. He is dedicated to Objectivism, Ayn Rand's philosophy of reason in all matters.